Background Constant Contact Size

Constant Contact happen to be from the email marketing game since 1995. During that time they have managed to turn into one of the email tools in the world, boasting over 650,000 customers. Constant Contact Size

What Makes them unique is that they have added several features over the decades that not one like an event management tool, surveys, and social campaigns. All these contribute to the list of alternatives as well as automations and recurring newsletters.

On top of these options, they also boast a Market with over 400 apps and integrations that cater for even the most niche of products. Yet despite features and these flashy numbers, curiosity about Constant Contact seems to be on the decrease, at least according to Google Trends. Enough reason for us to have a look at Constant Contact’s ins &amp; outs and check if it is still applicable in the 21st century.

If you are choosing an email Marketing tool for the small business, you could do a lot worse compared to Constant Contact (which starts at $20 a month). If you want to test a few of the features out without committing the business offers a trial. This review looks specifically. Were it not for a few hiccups that were unexplained, Constant Contact might have been an easy choice for our option.

How does Constant Contact stack up against the Competition for businesses with 2,500 contacts? It carries a 45-per-month price tag. Many marketing programs also have a cap on but Constant Contact does not.

Since our last look, Constant Contact has Added email autoresponders beyond those triggered such as anniversaries and birthdays. You can also send an email series to a set of contacts, such as a day-by-day guide to getting started with your service or follow-ups to a occasion. This works by matching them up using autoresponders and segmenting your contacts. The image library currently allows 2 GB of storage. Users can also access stock photographs that are paid and free directly through Constant Contact. Last, you can interact with support via Twitter. Constant Contact Size

Customer Support

Constant Contact is easy to use and has lots Starting with the information icons located alongside disciplines and choices describing what they are Knowledge Base trainers accessible, and articles. Constant Contact has an Activity page which lists the status of different jobs, such as contacts that are uploaded, so you know what’s happening in the background.

Phone support Isn’t 24/7 but the hours are Still pretty generous, going from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. during the week, also 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. Chat can be obtained, along with the agents will even call you to make sure you have.

Pricing and Features

Constant Contact offers a number of plans Depending on the size of your subscriber base. The least expensive plan is $20 per month for up to 500 subscribers and $45 for up to 2,500. A plan costs $335 for 50,000 and $195 for $10,000 subscribers. Price-wise, it’s not too different from Campaigner. You can register for other add-on providers, such as EventSpot ($20 a month for one occasion; $25 for up to five occasions ) for event registrations, and research ($10 per month) to conduct polls (all of which are included at no extra charge on the Mail Plus plan). The fundamental account comes to store pictures used in the email campaigns. MyLibrary Plus ($5 per month) expands your storage to 1 GB. Newsletter Archive ($5 a month) creates a widget which may be added to a site on which you can display links to up to 100 mails. This is a if you want your clients to have the ability to see your messages that are older.

The free trial gives you access to all of These attributes for 60 days however you can just send up to 100 mails. The trial is a great way to get accustomed to the platform for a number of messages. Once you are certain about the platform, upgrade to the paid version and start blasting away. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is uncommon in this space.

Campaigns

When you are ready to create a newsletter, you Can use the template to get started. The editing application allows you tweak text, images, and colors. There is also a media library where you are able to save your personal assets, such as company logos and other graphics. Constant Contact Size

As Soon as You’re Happy with your newsletter, It is possible to send it right away or schedule it for later (in 5-minute intervals, such as 3:05 a.m., 3:10 a.m., and so forth ). We couldn’t find a recurring schedule to send messages on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis the way Campaigner doesto send messages depending on the local time at the receiver’s place, as GetResponse can.

The company recently announced a new Feature called Action Blocks, which allow marketers to add polls or RSVP blocks to regular emails. This permits recipients to answer messages with one click without needing to depart the email inbox and also go to some web page.

Tracking Efforts

As Soon as You’ve sent a newsletter, then you are able to track using the Reports tab, its success. The dash displays the basics, including unsubscribe requests, and opens, clickthroughs, bounces. A handy bar graph shows open rates along with a chart compares performance over multiple campaigns. Users can also select up to five mails to compare high-level results side by side. The report has a handy Refresh button so you can see real-time outcomes. It’s not like MailChimp where you have to manually load the pages. When we opened emails and clicked on the links, they were enrolled nearly instantly.

The Resource Center offers links to Information about typical clickthrough rates by business. You may also look at relative metrics to find out if your degree of engagement with your customers is improving or declining over the past 3 months. The mobile app is handy if you want to see the campaign functionality from your mobile device.

Lists

There are several ways to add contacts to Constant Contact: copy and paste, manually type addresses into a type, upload a file (CSV, XLS, XLSX, or TXT), import from Gmail, or pull from Outlook and other (CRM) tools.

After we used the form Speech, we repeatedly received an error message but it didn’t state what had gone wrong. We were prompted to hit the Previous button to go back and resolve the issue but we couldn’t because the page had died out of our browser (Firefox) cache. After a few tries, the entire page crashed. This is an odd experience, to say the least. Constant Contact has ensured us its infrastructure has greatly improved because our first test and this is unlikely to happen again.

The file upload, Gmail import, and CRM Migration options, on the other hand, were simple to use and secure. We think most people would end up using one of these choices. We monitored the upload progress under”Contacts: Task” and was notified while the import was finish. Like Campaigner, Constant Contact allows Mailinator and other addresses that are disposable. It is too bad most services don’t comply with the case of GetResponse$15.00 at GetResponse, which filters out famous disposable domains. Constant Contact instead flags contacts that are likely so the user can decide whether to eliminate or keep them to be transactional or other similar email addresses.

Segments are originally based on which list you When saving the contacts but additionally, it is really easy to go back, Select and adjust the list. From the Contact Manager, we clicked on the addresses we wanted to add to another list. A new feature enables users to choose a list for contacts to be added to if they click on a link within an email, the company said. This feature is available in all packages. Furthermore, it may be paired with an autoresponder so that, when a touch clicks a link, there is a email sent to them automatically. Constant Contact lets you assign tags to contacts, which can be helpful if you need to track things like the way they signed up, if they’re loyalty associates, or anything else you might want to monitor. Constant Contact Size

Our only quibble with the Contact Manager is That it’s a hassle to edit the user records. After we cut and pasted our list, we just dropped in addresses. We did not have other areas, such as name or address. To bring this, update the subjects and we needed to load each person record. Because the pages were slow to load in our testing, this was not that straightforward. Since we can see the whole list in Contact Manager, it would have been nice to be able to simply click on the lost field, input, and just keep going straight down the page. So, lesson learned: Be certain to have all the applicable fields before uploading the titles, populated from the list.

Constant Contact also enables you to produce forms That clients can use to register for emails and newsletters. These forms may be hosted either on your own site or on Constant Contact’s servers. The users can be segmented by you based on if they used methods or the form, which can be helpful. The company also recently announced a new sign-up form editor that is designed to allow users to create inline forms that can be embedded onto a website in addition to pop-up forms that could be customized to display after a set amount of time or when a visitor attempts to leave the web site, the business said.

Constant Contact demands you to confirm that You have consent from your whole list–no bought lists allowed! Since there is no way to confirm you have permission from each individual receiving messages sent to that address you can not use set addresses like sales @ or advertising @ addresses or distribution lists. You might also create autoresponders, listed under the button, to send every time a user is added to some list. We used the templates to construct a special Welcome newsletter to new subscribers.

Drawbacks

Constant Contact generally feels like a Professional stage but its arbitrary error messages were disconcerting. This aside, the instrument is strong, and for companies Constant Contact is a fantastic way to begin. We wish it offered a little more flexibility in the scheduling of campaigns and production of autoresponders in particular. Constant Contact Size

If you don’t need these features, However Constant Contact is an excellent choice. Should you want just a little bit more flexibility in your marketing strategy, then have a look at email marketing Editors’ Choices Campaigner and MailChimp.

Automation

Because Constant Contact merely offers seven Kinds of advertising automation functions, the company does not like to refer to itself as a marketing automation suite that is traditional. Rather, Constant Contact likes to inform prospects that it is a cross between email marketing and advertising automation or exactly what it requires”email automation.”

That is because, unlike other tools, for example Editors’ Choice advertising automation systems Pardot and HubSpot, Constant Contact does not does not provide branching logic. It focuses to start automation campaigns. By way of instance, an automation workflow can be started by you whenever someone achieves a landmark, such as a birthday or anniversary for a customer or joins a list. You can’t change automationsbased on whether somebody opened an email, forwarded an email, or clicked on a link.

These attributes, which make marketing Automation platforms automatic slightly more smart and, well, than email marketing tools, create life personalized and easier for entrepreneurs for clients. Additionally, Constant Contact doesn’t offer A/B testing (they do provide subject line A/B testing), no search marketing inclusion, and also the restricted workflows you can create do not offer drag-and-drop builders, which are pretty much standard nowadays. If you need automation for first and second interactions with clients Constant Contact is a reliable automation system. However, if you would like flexible workflows and advanced sequencing that adapt to your clients’ specific activities, then Constant Contact is not powerful enough to compete at the marketing automation area.

Conclusion

As Constant Contact themselves reiterate through their site, they are a tool for businesses. And, as such, it’s well worth evaluating them on these conditions. As mentioned previously, they have enough of the fundamentals covered to meet companies, and then we’d recommend them highly, if it had been as simple as that. Constant Contact Size

These days, the issue, is that there are Lots of other email Tools offering even more than Constant Contact, and also for a whole lot less cash. This includes not only features, but also user expertise. In reality, for the amount you pay with Constant Contact, you might find yourself using more powerful tools like GetResponse and ActiveCampaign.

They do pick up points For their adequate deliverability rates, integrations (especially social websites integrations), also for allowing different access levels for separate users. And with recent improvements to marketing automation and reporting, it will seem like they’re making an effort. However, their lack of features, such as marketing automation, makes it difficult to recommend over others at their price point. Constant Contact Size